


American English

by iridescentglow



Category: Gossip Girl RPF
Genre: Het and Slash, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:38:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iridescentglow/pseuds/iridescentglow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Do you have fuck buddies in England?" Chace asked.</i> How Ed Westwick went from being an average kid from Stevenage to being a notch on Chace Crawford's bedpost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	American English

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my betas, proofpudding and topofthepiano.
> 
> **Disclaimer:** Lies! All of it lies! Unlike the tabloid hacks, I fully admit that I'm just making stuff up to amuse myself. ;) In all seriousness, parts of this fic get a little unseemly and I want to stress that it was all written and intended as fiction. The views expressed in this fic are not necessarily my own.
> 
> **Warnings:** het and slash; non-monogamy (mostly of the unethical kind); minor drug use.

**_Prologue_**

 

"Do you have Starbucks in England?" asked Chace. He guzzled at his frappuccino, sucking hard on the straw.

"Yep," said Ed.

They continued walking in near silence (only _near_ silence, because Chace continued to pleasure his drink like a two-dollar-whore in search of a tip) for half a block. They passed a subway station.

"Do you have the subway in England?" asked Chace.

"Yep," said Ed. "'Cept we call it the Underground."

Chace nodded thoughtfully and then said, "Do you have _Subway_ in England? Like, the sandwich place."

"Yep."

They passed two ladies carrying miniature poodles. Their dogs were dressed in pink sweaters (jumpers) and on their feet were tiny booties. Chace leaned in close to Ed. He whispered, "Do you have _that_ in England?"

"Alarmingly, yes, we do."

_Do-you-have-[blank]-in-England?_ was a game Ed was forced by Chace to play regularly. At first, he had found it tediously annoying, but over time, it had merely evolved into something that he and Chace did when they were together. The incessant questions didn't bother him anymore, but Ed didn't honestly think there was much difference between London and New York. They were both loud, noisy, filled with people who'd sooner kick you into the gutter than lend you a helping hand. Most of the stores (shops) and restaurants were the same. The cultural difference wasn't exactly profound. Yet Chace still insisted on questioning Ed, endlessly trying to pin down the subtle particularities of his home country.

Chace was quiet for almost half a block. Then he spied a cart on the sidewalk (pavement). His eyes lit up.

"Hey! Do you have funnel cake in England?"

Ed shrugged. He couldn't recall the name, although _fuck knows_, sometimes he failed to live up to Chace's view of him as a walking encyclopaedia of Britishness. "Don't think so," he said.

"Dude, seriously?" Chace was always bizarrely pleased when Ed's answer amounted to _no_. He reached out and grabbed Ed's arm, dragging him towards the cart. "You haven't _lived_, man."

Several minutes later, each armed with funnel cake, they continued on their way.

"You like it?" Chace asked enthusiastically, before shovelling his mouth full.

In truth, Ed found the strange battered goo a little sickly sweet for his taste. "It's delicious," he lied.

Chace beamed. "I told you."

Ed nodded vaguely. He didn't share the thought with Chace, but it occurred to him that there was another thing England had that America was generally deficient in: _tact_.

*

**_Chapter 1_**

 

When Ed first met Chace, he thought he was terribly wholesome. _Terribly_ wholesome. He was so… American. Hilariously, mystifyingly so. He said _shoot_ instead of _shit_; he opened doors for women; he asked a million pleasant-yet-prying questions about Ed's life. He was from _Texas_, fergodssake.

The two of them had become roommates purely as a matter of convenience. At one of the preliminary meetings with the _Gossip Girl_ producers, Ed had, without thinking, dropped the fact that he was homeless. Chace had chipped in that he was looking for an apartment, too, and that it would be easier to find a two-bed. In a matter of moments, it was settled: the two of them would room together. "Hey, it's better than looking on Craigslist, right?" Chace had joked. Ed only had the vaguest idea of what Craigslist was, but he was beginning to think that wrangling a hobo from Times Square into rooming with him might have been a better option.

During the first week of filming, Ed sent dozens of covert text messages to his friends in Stevenage. Most of the texts were dedicated to mocking Chace's clean-cut appearance and overly-earnest demeanour.

Then, gradually, Ed got used to Chace. He saw Chace stumbling around the apartment first thing in the morning, unshaven and with mussed hair. He witnessed Chace swear like a normal person when he jammed his hand in a drawer. Chace began to seem a little more like a human being and a little less like a Ken Doll. However, there was still a veneer to Chace – a quality to his smile – that unnerved Ed. When Chace described his childhood in Texas – his two dogs, his kid sister – it all seemed so alarmingly perfect. By contrast, Ed's childhood felt a bit grimy. The only pet he'd ever owned was a mangy, one-eyed cat, while his siblings seemed to be headed irrevocably down the road of chaviness.

Still, the two of them became friends – of a sort. When Ed stopped making a mental catalogue of reasons not to like Chace, he found that he was actually a pretty good guy.

Like every friendship Ed had had since the age of twelve, his friendship with Chace revolved around drinking. Instead of standing on street corners in Stevenage, they hit the Village. Instead of bottles of White Lightning purchased from the Spar, they drank cocktails with dirty names at hip clubs. The principle – and the results: puking at around three a.m. – remained broadly the same.

When he went out with friends, Ed liked to play a game. The game was this: both of you tried to chat up the prettiest girls in the bar and whoever got the most phone numbers won. It wasn't a sophisticated game, but it was a satisfying one. Ed was actually so good at the game that his friends in Stevenage now refused to play it with him. Chace was, admittedly, a little more of a lure for the ladies than any of Ed's friends at home, but Ed liked a challenge. Chace was up for playing the game, even though he had a girlfriend. Chace just took the girls' numbers and never called. When Ed probed him about it, he shrugged. "I'm allowed to look. Doesn't mean I'm not faithful."

Ed didn't know that anyone under the age of 50 used the word _faithful_. It made him sound like a Labrador. Still, Ed took his word for it.

The first time Ed and Chace went out, Ed got three numbers and Chace got six. The second time, Ed got four numbers and Chace got six again. Ed thought this might be an indication that his prowess was building, slowly and steadily. However, the third time they went out, Chace got eight numbers and Ed only got two. The fourth time they went out, Ed got a blowjob in the bathroom from a girl named Gemma. He felt that made him a winner, no matter how the figures stacked up. But the fact was, just in the time it took Gemma to go down on Ed, Chace got three numbers.

After that, they stopped playing the game. Ed conceded that he'd met his match. However, he still found himself idly counting the number of girls who gave Chace their number. Girlfriend or not, Chace was pretty much drowning in possibilities.

*

One evening in October, Ed was sprawled sideways across his bed, listening to Babyshambles and contemplating the fact that his two-day hangover finally seemed to have shifted.

"Hey," Chace said, poking his head around the door, "Carrie's in town. We're gonna get some dinner. You should come."

"_Fuck forever, if you don't mind_," Pete Doherty intoned, profoundly.

"You want me to come?" Ed replied, squinting up at Chace. He felt a twinge of pain at his temple. Okay, so his hangover wasn't _completely_ gone.

"Yeah! Come meet my girl."

Ed couldn't recall ever hearing anyone unironically refer to their girlfriend as _my girl_. "Just the three of us?" he said.

Chace smiled encouragingly. "Sure."

Ed strenuously avoided spending any length of time with couples. They were usually so absorbed in each other's behaviour (and oblivious to the rest of the world, him included) that it got tedious after approximately three minutes. The only time he'd ever gone out to dinner with another couple was when his mate, Ste was dating a girl named Indie (short for Indigo). That was less about the three of them hanging out and more about the fact that Ed fancied Indie and was trying to undermine Ste's relationship with her. (It worked. Ed and Indie had three weeks of mind-blowing sex – two weeks of which happened while Indie was technically still Ste's girlfriend. In Ed's defence, Ste told anyone and everyone that he was only with Indie until his former girlfriend got back from Thailand. Fucking Stevenage and his fucking friends.)

Ed definitely wasn't trying to undermine Chace's relationship with Carrie – although Carrie was cute, in a toothy, wholesome sort of way – but Chace seemed so sincere in his invitation that Ed reluctantly agreed to go to dinner anyway.

Chace lingered in the doorway. "Hey, you got anything to smoke?" he asked finally.

Ed guessed he didn't mean cigarettes. He shrugged and reached under his mattress. Where, five years earlier, porn might have been hidden, there was now a tin box filled with papers, tobacco and a bag of weed. Ed had seen Chace stoned before – it had come as a slight surprise, the first time that Chace had gone outside "for a cigarette" and come back reeking of pot smoke – but the two of them had never got stoned together.

Ed wanted to ask, _why now?_ He guessed, however, that the answer was pretty simple: Chace wasn't as thrilled to see his girlfriend as he should be.

Chace sat down on Ed's bed – he did so a little primly, the way girls would signal that they were only taking a seat and not gearing up for sex. Ed rolled a joint, took a hit from it and then passed it to Chace. The two of them passed the joint back and forth, until it burned down. The silence that settled between them might normally have been uncomfortable, but it was rendered comfortable by the simple back-and-forth rhythm of toking.

"Hey, this music's good," Chace said, breaking the silence at last.

Ed guessed this sudden affirmation had more to do with the warmth creeping into Chace's bones than any real appreciation for Babyshambles. However, Ed agreed happily with the statement. He never really needed an excuse to ramble about Pete Doherty. While he was talking, Chace seemed to finally relax. The joint finished, Chace lay back, sinking into the mattress. With eyes closed, he smiled slightly.

"Chicks go crazy for your accent, don't they?" he said, when Ed paused for breath in his lengthy discussion of Pete vs. Carl post-Libertines.

It wasn't a question that Ed exactly knew how to answer. Chace still had his eyes closed. Ed, propped up on his elbows, stared at him. As if feeling the weight of his gaze, Chace half opened his eyes, glancing over at Ed. At the corners of his eyes, Ed could see the crinkles that would one day turn to laughter lines. For once, Ed did not unconsciously think of Chace as being made from plastic. The sense of him as a real person – formed of flesh and breath – was suddenly overwhelming.

The emotion made its way out of Ed's mouth as a burst of laughter. In his stoned state, he couldn't process his desire for Chace in any manner except a schoolgirl giggle.

"You're fucking weird," Chace said, echoing his laughter – but in a lower, more manly timbre.

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," Ed said, spluttering through the last of his laughter. "I really mean it."

Ed fumbled for the tin box, planning to roll another joint. He grinned hard and savoured the absurd, artificial buoyancy of his mood. He did not, as it happened, want to go out to dinner with Carrie-the-American-Idol. He did not want to do much of anything. Instead, he wanted to stay right here, in this spot – maybe six inches to the left, but not further. He wanted to order in food, get stoned out of his mind and maybe… maybe.

He glanced again at Chace, whose expression was flushed. He did not look Ken-like at all. Ed was almost sure that he could grope between his legs and find a dick there. Without realizing it, Ed had begun to think about kissing Chace. Fantasy momentarily overlaid the present moment and Ed sucked Chace's absurdly pink bottom lip into his mouth.

He blinked and the image cleared. He couldn't tell, in his befuddled state, if he wanted to make out with Chace specifically or just make out in general. If he weren't stoned, he might have been depressed to think of the list of names in his cell phone. There were plenty of girls he knew – girls he could call up, meet with and maybe even fuck – but none that he felt comfortable enough around to spend an unremarkable afternoon of happy, stoned fumbling.

"The English for make out is snog, but I always think that's not right… it misses the… the subtlety of make out. _Make oooout_," Ed burbled, barely aware that he was speaking out loud.

Chace looked at him for a long moment. Panic sliced through Ed's buzz. Had he really just betrayed the fact that making out – not even fucking, but _making out_ – was on his mind?

At that moment, the buzzer sounded in the hall.

"Oh, shit," said Chace – Ed guessed that if he were not stoned, the word would not have slipped out.

The mattress shifted and Chace was gone. The last of Ed's fantasy faded. He finished rolling the second joint and tried not to care. From the hallway, he heard Chace talking to Carrie via the intercom.

"Hey, baby," Chace said, the slowness of his vowels just barely betraying his altered state.

"Can I come up, or is the place a disaster area?" a crackly female voice replied.

The place was, Ed reflected, a bit of a disaster area. No one had done the dishes in a while and the last of the warm weather was making the apartment (flat) smell slightly ripe. Nonetheless, when Ed heard Chace tell Carrie to wait in the cab downstairs, he suspected it was so that Chace could buy himself a couple of minutes grace before he had to face his girlfriend. Two minutes: enough time to throw on a clean shirt and douse yourself in enough cologne to cover the telltale smoky smell.

Reluctantly, Ed extinguished his joint. With difficulty, he levered himself off the bed. While Chace was undoubtedly rummaging through his own bedroom looking for clothes, Ed did the same. He grabbed a shirt – ostensibly clean – from his closet (wardrobe). He began a half-hearted search for some cologne, but he suspected the bottle was buried somewhere beneath layer of dirty clothes that covered his floor.

Chace appeared in his doorway. "Ready to go?" he asked. He sounded sober – Ed suspected he was making a concerted effort – but his eyes were still murky.

"Ready as I'll ever be," Ed said, in subtle mockery of Chace's laboured speech.

As they left the apartment, Ed belatedly realized that his "clean" shirt was not only crumpled but also less-than-clean. By contrast, Chace wore a pristine white shirt that was probably Armani. He smelled like a perfect synthetic approximation of a summers day on a yacht.

"Don't worry, we're not going anyplace fancy," Chace called over his shoulder, as they walked down the stairs, heading towards Carrie-in-a-cab.

The statement had the effect of making Ed more self-conscious, not less. He rolled his eyes at Chace's back, which was perfectly muscular. Chace seemed, once more, to be distinctly Ken-like.

*

At dinner, Ed was bored, fidgety and ravenous. He got the impression that this combination did not make him the greatest dinner companion. Although Carrie smiled a lot, sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, Ed could see distaste in her expression. He could tell she was thinking, _what the hell_ (sorry, heck) _is he doing here?_

He wanted to reply, _I have no fucking clue, sweetheart._

Meanwhile, Chace played the doting boyfriend with the same clumsy finesse that he played Nate Archibald on set. He held her hand across the table and gazed deep into her eyes as she spoke. Ed suspected that he liked the idea of being a good boyfriend more than the practice of it. Carrie was seated facing the room, while Ed had a view of the bar. When Chace went to get drinks, Ed saw the hot, blonde bartender give him her number.

Abruptly, Ed pushed back his chair and stood up. "I'm going to piss," he said and didn't wait for a reply from Carrie.

Chace still lounged against the bar, talking and laughing with the bartender. On his way to the restroom (toilet), Ed veered close to him.

"You're a real prize, aren't you?" Ed called. He didn't know why he was so angry all of a sudden. Carrie was nothing to him. And it wasn't as if he had never cheated on a girlfriend. Yet something about Chace's behaviour tonight was bugging him.

As he continued to the restroom, Ed saw Chace cast a bemused look at the bartender. The two of them shared a laugh at Ed's seemingly random outburst. Ed felt his face burn for a moment. He kicked open the bathroom door with more force than was necessary.

When Ed returned to the table, Chace was also seated once more. He turned to Ed with an encouraging smile. Ed felt like a cranky toddler that was being condescended to.

"Do you have Carrie in England?" Chace asked. "Like, I bet she's a total superstar."

"Yeah," Ed said dully. "We got Carrie. We got a hundred different regional variations."

Carrie gave him a confused smile and Chace quickly moved the conversation on.

Ed spent the remainder of the meal in silence. He ignored Chace's repeated and benign attempts to draw him into new topics of conversation. Instead, he engaged his mind with spiteful thoughts of what it would be like to fuck Carrie. Yet every time he imagined throwing her down on a bed, Chace would appear at the edge of the scene. Finally, Ed got tired of mentally chasing Chace away. He allowed Chace to be the one on the bed with Carrie, while he stood at the side, watching them fuck.

Ed stabbed at a carrot on his plate. What did he do to deserve such boring, All-American porn playing inside his head?

*

_**Chapter 2**_

 

November rolled around and production on the show shut down. The Writers' Strike left Ed rudderless, cheerfully paddling in the ankle-deep waters of his newfound fame. Being recognized on the street became less of a novelty; clubs became easier to get into; girls were more willing to be caught when he gave chase.

With few commitments to hold them in Manhattan, Ed and Chace both headed out of town with regularity. Their apartment grew dusty (well, dust_ier_). Rather than roommates, they became like ships passing in the night. Ed would come home to find the TV switched to ESPN and the vodka in the fridge gone; Chace had evidently come home for a few hours and then left again. Sometimes they wrote each other notes – Chace's were invariably more glamourous: _gone to Miami for the weekend!_ – but just as often they would forget and lose track of one another entirely.

It was with surprise that occasionally they both found themselves home at the same time. Startled, Ed would look up to find Chace sauntering through the front door. It became a running joke that it was like encountering a thief in your home. Chace, with his broad, childish sense of humour, took to the joke with gusto. When he was home, he liked to creep up on Ed. Placing his hands on Ed's shoulders, Chace would lean in close and whisper, "Boo!" It was a dumb joke, but Ed jumped every time.

"Do you have home invaders in England?" Chace asked once, when he'd finished laughing at Ed's skittish reaction.

"No," Ed said sourly. "We have quite proper robberies, where people don't fucking creep up on you. Wait, which one is houses? Robberies or burglaries? Fuck, I can never remember."

*

Ed went back to England for a month over Christmas – ostensibly to see his family, but really so that he could play some gigs with The Filthy Youth. He was glad to escape his new life for a while and be Ed-the-rockstar instead of 'That Guy off That Show'. It was alarmingly easy to slip back into his old life, his old skin. His mate, David was working at ASDA, doing the shifts that no one else wanted. Ed could imagine himself doing the same: snoozing through a rinky-dink supermarket job in order to support himself as he committed to the band year-round.

One night, he and Dave loitered in the break room, in the bowels of the Stevenage ASDA. It was three a.m. and they were drinking Smirnoff straight from the bottle. Dave produced a job application form and told Ed to fill it in. Ed gazed blearily at the form. He realized he could quit the show, quit New York, quit his apartment and his crazy American roommate. It was nice to know that the possibility existed. He could taste it on his tongue: freedom. (Well, actually, his tongue was so numb from the vodka that he couldn't taste anything, but that wasn't the point.) A small voice reminded him that he couldn't quit the show because he'd signed a contract. He filled in the ASDA application form anyway. He felt drunk and a little bit in love with the alternate version of himself that it prophesied. (Mostly drunk.)

Ed even got called for an interview, on the day before he was due to leave for the US. For the hell of it, he decided to attend. He arrived to the interview drunk _and_ stoned – a combination that made him feel like the whole room was underwater. He tried to answer the questions as if he were playing a role: himself with a few changes. Later, when he was in a taxi, heading for Heathrow Airport, he found that the parts of himself had gotten (got) confused. He couldn't tell if returning to New York would mean a return to his real self or just more acting.

*

"Hey buddy, I missed you," Chace said, when Ed walked through the door of their apartment.

It was such a plain declaration of emotion that Ed was suspicious. He squinted skeptically at Chace. "You did?"

Chace crossed the room and slapped him on the shoulder. "Sure! Come on, let's go out."

Ed's body had no idea what time it was. He'd spent half the day in the air and the other half waiting around airports. He was drunk on free champagne, delivered by stewardesses in tight skirts. He was drunker still on tiredness. He felt like he might collapse at any moment. But he was in New York and what was there to do in New York except go out? "Why not," he mumbled.

The night was the kind that everyone in Stevenage always wanted him to describe: expensive and affected; hedonistic in a uniquely New York way. Incongruously, the club was so dark that you could barely see the lavish décor or the beautiful people that lined the walls. You knew they were there, though: that was what the club promised. Ed was drunk enough that he willingly got up to dance, uncoordinated and unembarrassed. The music was terrible – mostly repetitive electro from the Continent, which Manhattan-ites thought was terribly cool, just because they couldn't understand it – but Ed danced anyway, limbs pushing out wildly. Chace always danced, of course. He wasn't any good at it, but there was always a hot girl to press up against him.

Ed's BlackBerry purred in his pocket: new email. He had to hold the screen very close to his face in order to read the message. He giggled at how he must look, leering crazily at his phone. He expected the email to be from one of his friends – a _miss-you-already-fucker_ message, but it was a clipped letter addressed to Mr Westwick.

"I got a job!" he screamed.

The girl he was dancing with – the one who had tried and failed to score with Chace and was now lowering her sights – looked at him uncertainly. He realized he was grinning like a lunatic.

"I got a job at ASDA!" he said again.

"Congratulations…" The girl (Belinda? Melinda?) evidently decided he was worth humouring. "That's great news!"

Ed realized she probably thought that ASDA was the name of a hot new production company. The idea made him grin even harder. He and Bel-Mel had been doing a clumsy sort of bump 'n grind, but now he hoisted her up under her armpits and spun her around in circles. The people around them yelled their displeasure as Ed and Bel-Mel careened across the dancefloor like a grenade exploding. Ed didn't care. He felt sick and exuberant. Soon it felt like he wasn't the one doing the spinning; the room itself tilted and swerved, sparkling with every motion.

*

A few days later, Ed met Leighton for lunch at four p.m.

"What did you do over Christmas?" Leighton said, in lieu of a greeting, as she arrived at the café. She swooped down close to Ed, angling her face so that he could give her a kiss on the cheek (but not bestowing one on him). Without waiting for a reply, she continued talking. "Mine was too fucking boring to even talk about. How was yours? I bet London's beautiful in December. God, I'm so jealous. Of course, all that pales in comparison to what our friend Chace has been up to." She rifled through her ridiculously oversized (and undoubtedly designer) bag and, with a flourish, produced a magazine. "Apparently he's sleeping with my sixth-grade crush. Talk about jealous."

Ed leaned back in his chair, waiting to Hurricane Leighton to settle. In some ways, Leighton was the quintessential Young New Yorker: always talking; always checking her phone; always far too busy to listen. When she mellowed out – rediscovered her Florida roots – he liked her a lot more. As he listened to her tell the waiter what she wanted for lunch – an order so specifically customized as to barely resemble what was on the menu – Ed picked up the magazine. It was a gossip rag, full of glossy pictures and half-truths. Leighton, apparently revealing an OCD tendency, had actually marked the page about Chace and JC Chasez with a pink Post-It note.

Ed let out a snort of laughter as he scanned the article. "This thing's priceless."

"I know, right?" Leighton said, settling into a sigh of contentment borne of someone else's embarrassment. "It's everywhere. Everyone's talking about it. My manager says it's good news. For me, anyway. Buzz for Chace is buzz for the show."

Leighton talked about her career like she actually _thought_ about her career, rather than just letting it happen. She expressed genuine concern about the Writers' Strike, as opposed to viewing it as an unexpected vacation (holiday). For Ed, acting was still, essentially, something he did for attention. Going on set and filming wasn't much different to dressing up in a red velvet curtain and playing Tamburlaine in his school play.

Ed pushed the magazine aside. He found he was bored of the conversation already – bored and a little irritated. Ready for a subject change, he said to Leighton, "Tell me about _your_ Christmas."

She _hem_'ed and _haw_'ed for a moment about how boring it had all been, but quickly the reluctance rubbed away. She began to talk at length about spending time with her family: fond recollections that glinted like silver baubles. She took off her oversize sunglasses and leaned forward as she talked, resting her chin on her hands like a child. It was this Leighton that Ed liked: the enthusiastic, unaffected girl. She could be disarmingly average when she wasn't trying hard to be chic: it was a peculiar thing to find attractive, but then, Ed was interested in flaws more than perfection.

They'd had sex once and once only. Call it method acting gone awry, but it had happened on set. After more than an hour of rolling around on a king-size bed as Chuck and Blair – kissing without tongues; touching only in places the censors allowed – the sexual frustration had become rather too much for them. During a break from filming, they'd scurried away like naughty schoolchildren. The beauty of filming on location, in real Manhattan houses, was that there was always an empty room to be found; a sumptuous lifestyle to hijack and then violate.

Ed remembered Leighton's (Blair's) red stockings, the thrill of peeling them away to reveal creamy smooth thighs. Following an hour of foreplay for an audience, they got down to it quickly. There were kisses messy with too much tongue (because now, after all, they were allowed); a breathless panting that felt specifically adolescent, as they struggled to undo buttons and align body parts. The sex was good, but not amazing. Leighton was on top. She was a little domineering, controlling the pace and telling him to shut up when he made too much noise. Ed got a vague sense that a film of Blair still clung to her. He imagined Leighton-as-Leighton might be a more easy-going fuck.

Afterwards, Leighton pulled the red stockings back on. She said, matter-of-factly, "Good. That's done with."

For a moment, Ed was mildly offended. With someone else's sweat still cooling on your skin, you didn't just declare the sex _done with_. Then he looked at her – soft eyes and a rueful smile. He realized what she meant. The sexual attraction that existed between them was a nuisance, a distraction. To act on it was to put it aside. Now they could continue as before – as friends – without a gaudy _what if?_ hanging above their heads.

If, for Leighton, the sex was a way to move on, Ed had to admit that it hadn't quite served the same purpose for him. He still couldn't shake the feeling that he might like another shot at it, a chance to prove they could be good together. Leighton, however, had made it clear she wasn't interested. Ed suspected she thought she was too good for him. In fairness, it was probably true.

Now that a few months had passed, Ed had grown closer to Leighton. She was fun to go out with – there were, after all, no clubs in the city that wouldn't admit you if you were with a smoking-hot girl. She knew how to party (unlike some people, cough, Blake, cough). He even had a good time with her when they were just hanging out, doing nothing. It would be a girly kind of thing to admit, but Ed didn't want to ruin their friendship with more sex.

"Hey!" Leighton reached out and smacked him across the chest. "You're not listening to me."

"I am!" he protested. Then he slipped into a sly smile and admitted, "Alright, I'm not."

Leighton smiled back at him, rolling her eyes. "So tell me what you've been up to, Mr English Rockstar Guy."

They were interrupted by the arrival of their food. It seemed like all the fat Leighton had ordered removed from her own dish had been heaped onto Ed's plate. He scooped up a creamy piece of pasta happily. As they each chomped away, not speaking, Ed ran through a mental list of stories to tell Leighton. He could tell her about getting the job at ASDA, but that story was already beginning to feel tired; he had embellished it beyond the point where it was truly amusing. Then he realized Leighton was the one person he knew who he could tell another story to: one that had become a little dusty with secrecy. It wasn't something he was ashamed of, but something that required discretion. He glanced around the restaurant. Lunch-at-four-p.m. meant that they practically had the place to themselves. There was no one to overhear them.

He grinned wolfishly. "Guess who I ran into the other night?"

"I don't know. Dick Cheney. The Dalai Lama," Leighton said, with her mouth full.

"Close. Albert Hammond Jr."

"I don't know who that is."

"You know who JC Chasez is, but you don't know who Albert Hammond Jr is?" Ed said, manufacturing a little outrage. Mostly he just liked saying Albert's full name. It made the whole story zing a little more. "He's rhythm guitarist for The Strokes."

"Is rhythm guitar different to regular guitar?" Leighton said, and Ed got the feeling she was teasing him.

Ed rolled his eyes and forged on with the story. The night he'd met Albert had been a lot like a celestial experience. (He definitely remembered a girl exclaiming, _Jesus Christ!_ when he spilled his drink on her shoes.) The atmosphere inside the bar was thick and sweaty and fucking sublime. "You're… you," was his inspired opening line when he realized that the guy crammed into the same booth as him, mere metres away, was Albert Hammond Jr.

Albert rubbed a hand slowly through his hair and turned a lackadaisical smile on Ed. "Maybe," was his enigmatic answer and Ed could have kissed him right then.

By some blessing of the gods, Albert actually knew who he was. They talked for a while – although, through the haze of drunkenness, Ed couldn't remember much more of what they said. It was almost certainly profound. After about an hour, Albert's entourage began to peel off. (Ed, by contrast, had no entourage; only flighty friends who were more interested in picking up girls than witnessing his celestial experience. Chace was one such friend who had long since disappeared with a blonde in a pleather halter top.)

Finally, only the two of them remained in the booth. The final member of Albert's party motioned for him to leave, but Albert just gave a lazy wave of his hand. The shooing motion became a stretch and then, suddenly, Albert's arm lay across Ed's shoulders. The weight of Albert's arm made Ed feel gloriously trapped. He tried to wipe his sweating palms on his pants (trousers), but then discovered the proximity of Albert's thighs, encased in smooth, hot leather. Ed didn't remember much of the conversation, but he definitely remembered the low murmur of Albert's voice in his ear. He also remembered the question he posed in return.

"So what did he say?" Leighton interrupted, revealing goggle eyes and a suppressed smile.

"What d'you think? No man's gonna turn down a blowjob," Ed said matter-of-factly. He reached over and stole a radish from Leighton plate, popping it into his mouth with relish.

Not that it had any bearing on his technique, but it was technically the first blowjob Ed had given. For the record, his history of same-sex experimentation went like this: when they were 13, he and Harry Jameson wanked each other off after drinking half a bottle of Jägermeister. He spent the next day puking and the following two weeks in a quivering state of terror that he might be a homo. Then Lexxie Summerskill showed him her tits at a party and he decided he must be cured.

Over the years, Ed maintained a steady stream of girlfriends. However, alcohol, combined with late-night desperation, led to a few more questionable sexual encounters – although none involving Harry Jameson (come to think of it, last thing Ed heard, Harry's family had joined a cult). He wasn't exactly vocal about it, but Ed was comfortable enough with his sexuality to include boys in the equation. After all, being a rockstar was all about experimentation. All the greatest rockstars were bi: Bowie, Billie Joe, Elvis (probably). It was all about the person, all about the moment. And, as Ed gazed up at Albert's god-like features, he felt like he could enjoy going a little bit Elvis.

"So what was it like?" asked Leighton.

Ed paused to consider. He recalled crawling under the table, into the accommodating V of Albert's casually spread legs. He was too drunk to worry if anyone was watching; after all, the VIP section had probably seen a lot worse. He wondered whose footsteps he was following in – whose footsteps; whose fingers, fumbling over buttons and flies; whose thumbs, coaxing free an erection; whose mouth, opening hot and willing. It should have been a turn-off, to align himself with a thousand other groupies and casual admirers, but it wasn't.

"It was fucking great," he replied.

He felt the itch of a craving for a cigarette, but it was too cold to stand outside and smoke. Instead, he exhaled long and slow, twisting an imaginary filter-tip between his fingers. He shifted in his seat, still thinking over Leighton's question.

"I thought it might be gross, but… it wasn't. Do you think it's gross?"

"Nuh," said Leighton. "Not with the right person."

Her eyes looked a little glazed, and Ed wondered what she was thinking about – or, specifically, _who_. She reached over to his plate and used her fork to scoop up some pasta. She chewed on it slowly, wiping her mouth with her napkin, even though none of the sauce had strayed beyond her lips. Her eyes cleared for a moment and they stared at one another. Even as their minds were tangled with thoughts of other people, the moment felt charged. In a perverse way, it was more intense than when they'd had sex.

Leighton pushed back her chair suddenly. She flashed him a quick smile, busying her hands with tying her scarf around her neck.

"I gotta go, darling," she said. "Call me if you get bored. Hopefully we'll be back to playing at richlings soon enough. God knows, I hope the strike breaks soon. For that matter, I hope this goddamn _weather_ breaks soon. I hate snow. It's so… cold!"

She scarcely waited for a reply from him before the storm of her busy, busy life swept in and whisked her away again. He watched in bemusement as she stalked across the café in her best runway (catwalk) model approximation. For a moment, he thought she'd stuck him with the check (bill), but then he saw her wave her AmEx at a waiter and wait impatiently for him to charge it. Ed grinned. Leighton was all class.

Ed finished up the rest of his meal; less because he was hungry and more because he needed something to occupy his hands. Leighton had left behind the magazine with Chace and JC in it, so Ed found himself idly paging through it. These were people like him, people who might not even have been aware of it as they'd chosen the glare of celebrity, the good and bad that came with being recognized.

Ed sighed and sat back in his chair, his thoughts spiralling back to Albert. When he was fourteen, he used to lie on his bed in his room in Stevenage, staring at the ceiling and listening to _Is This It?_ obsessively. He'd liked music before, but it had never affected him in quite the same way as The Strokes. This album had clawed its way inside of him, the guitars settling in his stomach as a low roar. In truth, sucking Albert's dick didn't feel weird, because he felt like he'd already done it. He'd been fucked by Julian's voice, Fab's drumming, Albert's guitar a thousand or more times.

When he used to listen to _Is This It?_ as a teenager, he fantasized about people in New York with lives more exciting than his own. He realized he couldn't quite reconcile that fantasy with his life now.

*

_**Chapter 3**_

 

It was midnight. Ed had ordered a pizza and, as a result, he couldn't seem to focus on anything except waiting for it to arrive. With the Writers' Strike recently broken, he was suffering from a back-to-school sort of ennui. He'd gotten used to his rudderless existence. The idea of going back to work, with shoots that began at six a.m. (hideous) or nine p.m. (worse, because it hampered his social life) was just plain depressing.

The end of the strike did mean that Chace was now back in Manhattan, more or less full-time. They were almost like real roommates again. Ed had to admit, it was kind of nice to have him around all the time. Tonight, however, Chace wasn't home, so the apartment felt strange and empty. Ed thought about putting on some music, but he couldn't remember where he'd put his mp3 player.

Their apartment was off-white. However, the colour scheme did not give the impression of a designer's stylistic choice, but a long, slow process by which the place had soured. There was a living room, with one corner optimistically labelled a kitchenette. Three doors led off the main space: they led to two bedrooms and a mouldy bathroom. The letting agent had assured him that the bedrooms were larger-than-average, but, to Ed's eye, this simply meant a greater expanse of yellowed white. Money did not go far in Manhattan and Ed often felt he was paying through the nose for an apartment that would not look out of place in the shadier parts of Stevenage. But it was a roof over his head, a place to store his beer, so he couldn't complain.

The place was sparsely decorated and Ed had never got around to buying much more furniture. The living room was dominated by a huge, threadbare couch (sofa) that had been left by the former tenants. Ed guessed that, through brute force and magic, the couch had made it _up_ three flights of stairs, but was destined never to make it down them again. Otherwise, the only places to sit were on a selection of uncomfortable footstool-type things (also a gift from the previous tenant). To Ed's relief, Chace had brought a big TV with him when he'd moved in, which gave the room a bit of life. Now Ed thought about switching it on, but he found that the remote control had also mysteriously gone missing. As he waited for his pizza to arrive, Ed sat on the couch in the heavy silence of the room, with his thoughts unravelling.

He was thinking about Albert. He'd been thinking about Albert a lot lately. (Albert? _Al_? No, Al sounded dumb: like a balding bloke you'd meet in Wetherspoon's. Definitely _Albert_.) Somehow, recounting his _thing_ with Albert to Leighton had made the encounter seem more real. As a result, it was lodged in his brain, taking up space that should be reserved for Victoria's Secret models. He wondered what Albert was doing, right at this moment. He realized that he didn't have a number to contact him and, therefore, no way of knowing what he was doing. The lack of information created an irritation on the back of his neck; a scritchy reminder that they weren't really friends at all.

He could go out, hit up the places where Albert was likely to hang out, but that would feel faintly stalkerish. What he wanted was for Albert to call _him_ – magically, because Ed hadn't given him his number either – and suggest they hit the town together. He wondered what they would even do together; if there would be more blowjobs; a giddy acceleration into full sex; a mind-body-and-spirit connection. Ed laughed out loud at the idea, but he felt a dull rattle at the back of his throat. Maybe he should just face facts: he was just a cheap tart; a silly kid who was amusing for an hour or so (and a blowjob), but good for nothing more.

The buzzer sounded: an over-long burst. Ed levered himself up off the couch and loped over to the door. "Yeah," he said into the speaker. He'd noticed that _yeah_ – like _thanks_ and _no problem_ – was a word that had become Americanized against his will; fuller and more brazen on his tongue than it been a year ago. In reply to his American _yeah_, all he received from the speakerphone downstairs was a staticky silence. He rolled his eyes. The pizza delivery guy was obviously too lazy to walk up three flights of stairs, so Ed would have to go down.

When Ed opened the door to the street below, he found there was no pizza delivery guy waiting – in fact, there was no one at all waiting. "Fucking kids," he muttered, even though this wasn't the kind of neighbourhood (area) where kids roamed the streets. Nonetheless, pressing buzzers and then running away seemed like a kid-ish thing to do. (Okay, so Ed had done it a lot when he was younger. He'd grown out of it, though, which made it okay for him to judge those who hadn't.)

"Hey…"

Ed looked around, wondering if he'd imagined the voice. Then, from the shadows, it came again, more insistent this time.

"_Hey_!"

In the alley between his apartment building and the one next to it, Ed saw a figure leaning against the wall. He seemed to be motioning for Ed to come closer. Ed hesitated.

"I'm not a fucking axe murderer, okay?" the voice said. "C'mere."

"Well, that's good to know, mate," said Ed, with a roll of his eyes. It was a special kind of crazies that you got in Manhattan. "I'm going back inside now. And locking the door."

A hand reached out from the shadows and grabbed Ed by the collar, dragging him into the alley. Now it was Ed's turn to shout, "Hey!"

The guy did not, in fact, look like an axe murderer. He was of average height, dressed in jeans, and with his brown hair crammed beneath a baseball cap. The only notable thing about him was the fact that he was shaking like a junkie. Ed examined his face more closely. _Oh_. Maybe that wasn't the _only_ notable thing about him.

"You're that guy from *NSYNC," Ed burst out, amusement overcoming his irritation.

Ed had meant to bring up the whole JC thing with Chace – what were friends for if not for mocking? – but somehow the right moment had never materialized. He had got the impression that Chace wasn't thrilled with his newfound infamy. When they were out drinking one night, Chace had said, without elaborating, that he had "a lot of shit going on right now". Ed had decided not to press the matter.

Now, faced with the rumour, large as life, Ed felt the same peculiar blend of starstruck-yet-scornful that went with running in the television biz. Almost every day, he was faced with people whose fame was supposed to intimidate him. And it did, until he noticed nostril hair or mismatched socks – and the glowing illusion of greatness stuttered out.

JC made a face, like he was debating whether he cared enough to challenge Ed's mocking tone. He apparently came down on the side of not caring very much, because he just let out a tired sigh and said, "You're Eddie, right? Chace's roommate?"

"Ed," he corrected JC. He wondered whether it was just a misapprehension, or if Chace ever referred to him as Eddie – a nickname formed without his knowledge or consent. He added: "Chace isn't home."

"Where is he?" JC said sharply.

Ed shrugged. "Don't know." He had a vague notion that Chace was attending some gallery opening tonight – pretentious git – but he might have imagined that nugget of information.

"Oh, you're covering for him," said JC. "That's cute."

Covering for him? Why would Chace need covering for? Were they eight years old? And why the hell were they conducting this conversation in an alley? Ed was beginning to think that JC, if not an axe murderer, was definitely some form of nutcase.

At that moment, he heard the hum of a motorbike. Before JC could reach out and grab him again, he darted away, back into the street. The pizza guy, his motorbike idling in the gutter, was pressing Ed's buzzer.

"Hey, that's mine," said Ed, gesturing towards the pizza.

The pizza guy looked uncertain, as if it were against protocol to give pizzas away to randoms on the street. But when Ed produced a fistful of bills (notes) from his pocket, the guy's ethical crisis evidently went away. He shrugged and handed over the pizza. Ed noticed that JC had crept out from the darkness of the alley in order to watch this exchange. However, when the pizza guy glanced over at him, JC turned his face away quickly, pulling at his baseball cap. Ed almost laughed out loud. Who did JC think this guy was… paparazzi? And yet, for all JC's reaction seemed melodramatic, Ed wondered how it must feel to have a long lens trained on you; to be watched so closely and constantly. At least when Ed left work, the cameras went away. The same could not be said for JC.

The pizza guy slung his leg over his motorbike and roared away. Ed remembered his plans for the evening: pizza and moody, self-imposed loneliness. He felt bizarrely resentful of JC for disturbing him. Holding the pizza in his hands sent a slow burn through his palms. "No offence, mate," he said to JC, "but you look like shit."

JC let out a single, brittle laugh. "I didn't get any sleep last night and I got on a plane at seven this morning to come here from LA. The plane had to make a stop in Texas for god knows what reason. Four hours down the drain. Now I'm here and I don't even know why." JC rubbed his face tiredly. "So yeah, I feel like shit, too."

Ed noticed that his hands were still shaking. He felt the faintest twinge of pity.

"D'you want a drink?" Ed asked. "A cigarette? …something else?"

JC cracked a smile, more genuine this time. "How about some pizza?"

*

As they sat in the apartment, eating pizza in silence, Ed covertly checked JC for mismatched socks or nostril hair. JC's wasn't wearing any socks (oh right, LA guy) and his nose looked pretty clean. Ed carried on munching his pizza and the silence stretched.

He realized that all he knew of JC was an amalgamation of whispers and rumours. He also knew his stats – his age (approximately), his career to date – in the same way that he knew Michael Jackson's stats. But those basic facts had been embellished as JC had congealed in the public eye. The result was, Ed knew a lot about JC, yet he also knew nothing at all.

"You wanna watch some TV?" JC asked at last, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

"I don't know where the remote is," Ed said sheepishly.

JC raised his eyebrows, as if to say, _Of course you don't, you fucking moron_.

Ed bit his tongue to keep from saying, _At least I wasn't in a boy band_.

The result was yet more silence.

*

When Chace arrived home twenty minutes later, Ed sent up a silent prayer to any relevant deity that might be listening. At least now he could offload responsibility for this unlikely houseguest. As Chace stepped through the doorway and spotted JC sitting on the couch, he did a startled double-take and then tried to cover it up with a big smile. (Chace really was a pretty poor actor, Ed reflected.)

"Hey, buddy!" Chace greeted JC. "I thought you were in LA, man. You shoulda called me."

"I did," JC replied coolly. "Your phone not working?"

Ed stood up. "Well, it's been fun, JC"—he clapped him on the shoulder—"but I'm gonna go to bed." He backed away from them, towards his bedroom door, and wagged his finger at Chace. "Now you kids don't stay up all night yammering. Remember, it's a school night."

Neither JC nor Chace registered his joke. In fact, Ed felt that he must have finally perfected his invisibility shield, because neither of them even bothered to say goodnight to him.

In his room, Ed lay down on his bed. He felt something digging into his shoulder. Jubilantly, he realized it was his mp3 player – not lost, after all! He cued _Up the Bracket_ and vowed to ignore whatever was happening in the next room.

He was halfway through 'Time For Heroes' when he heard a loud crash. He yanked out one of his earbuds in time to hear someone yell, _Don't fucking call me a coward!_ Ed couldn't tell who the voice belonged to. It might have been Chace, but Ed had never heard him sound so agitated or swear so vehemently.

Ed replaced his earbud and told himself it wasn't his business. He successfully fought his curiosity for two more songs. Then it all got too much for him. He pressed pause on his player. He crept across the room to his door and opened it an inch. From the sliver of the living room that was visible, Ed was able to see two things. One: the crash he'd heard was evidently the result of the coffee table being overturned. Two: Chace and JC might have been arguing earlier, but they definitely weren't arguing anymore.

It looked like they had fallen onto the couch more than they had particularly chosen the spot. Chace was pressed against the cushions, JC's hands pushing him down. In a different context, it might have looked like they were wrestling. However, the chances of that seemed slim, since JC's hands were busy pulling open Chace's pants. The two of them were _rutting_, rubbing up against each other, almost frantically. Then, finally, JC brought his face close to Chace's. When Chace kissed him, it looked more like a bite. Ed got the distinct impression that they were both still angry.

Ed contemplated staying and watching till the conclusion, but the prospect seemed a little pathetic. Instead, he closed the door and walked slowly back across his room.

He heard JC left a few minutes later. No long, slow lovemaking for this break up – and, belatedly, Ed realized that's what it was – just angry, dissatisfying handjobs on a tired couch.

Ed thought about avoiding the situation completely – he could crash out asleep and, tomorrow, fail to mention JC at all – but he also got the impression it would be shirking his roommate duty. Tentatively, Ed poked his head around his door. Chace was seated on the couch, staring blankly into space. Ed padded across the room and then stopped. He looked at the couch. He wasn't exactly keen on the idea of settling into the scene of Chace's messy breakup sex. However, the alternative was the perch on one of the uncomfortable footstool things. Finally, after a couple more seconds of silent debate, he gingerly took a seat next to Chace on the couch.

"You alright, mate?" Ed asked. He hesitated and then reached over and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.

Ed had to give Chace credit: he might be a mediocre actor, but he did try hard. Ed watched as he summoned a smile: perfectly symmetrical, showing the right number of teeth; the kind of smile girls swooned over. However, the smile faltered after a moment and his face looked slack and pale.

"I'm fine," he murmured. Then, more insistently, he added: "I'm great." Pause. "Thanks for asking."

"No problem," Ed said automatically.

The two of them drifted into silence. Ed watched as Chace picked up a piece of pizza that was still lying in the box on the floor. It was cold and the cheese was beginning to congeal. Regardless, Chace began to eat it – clearly because, if this were a scene, eating pizza would signal, _situation: normal_.

Finally, Ed burst out, "You know, you can tell me. Whatever's going on with you, you can _tell_ me. I mean. We're friends, right? We are friends."

Chace's face appeared to crumple. He made a valiant effort to finish eating the slice of pizza, but after another mouthful, he began to cough hard. With difficulty, he swallowed and then tossed the rest of the pizza aside.

"Do you have—" Chace broke off as he resumed coughing. Once the coughing fit subsided, he tried again. "Do you have fuck buddies in England? Like… friends you fool around with. Is that a thing in England?"

Ed almost laughed at the incongruity of the question. "Uh, yeah," he said. "That's not, like, a cultural phenomenon limited to the US. They probably have fuck buddies in, I don't know, the Gambia or something. Crawling into each other huts when they get lonely."

Chace smiled wanly at the joke. It was a faint smile, but a genuine one; ever-so-slightly lopsided.

"JC was my… you know, fuck buddy," he said. "It wasn't a big thing," he hurried on. "I mean, my manager – he's Jayce's manager, too – he suggested we start hanging out. Good publicity, you know. But we have stuff in common, too."

_You're both slightly ridiculous macho American dudes_, Ed supplied silently.

Chace sighed and said, "It's hard to find people that _get_ you in Hollywood…"

_But we're not in Hollywood_, Ed wanted to point out. He guessed Chace meant "Hollywood" in the broader sense – although, as far as he knew, pre-_Gossip Girl_, Chace's career had been as limited as his own.

"JC gets me," said Chace thoughtfully. "He's a good guy, you know," he added defensively, as if Ed had argued the opposite. "Not, like, stuck up about his fame." Chace sighed and repeated quietly, "He's a good guy."

Ed still did not quite understand how Chace and JC had gone from forming a mutual appreciation society to rutting on the couch. Chace, too, evidently realized he'd strayed off track, because he said again, "It's not a big deal. I'm not gay or anything." He let out a short, humourless laugh. "I'm _so_ not gay. I mean, I love women."

Chace glanced at Ed, as if for affirmation. Ed shrugged and nodded. "Yeah, women," he echoed. In truth, he found Chace's 'I'm straight – I just have sex with my male friends, who are also straight' attitude a little bewildering. It certainly didn't align with his own libertine view of sexuality.

"JC and I mess around sometimes."

Ed didn't really understand this American thing, of characterizing sexual acts as _messing_ around, _fooling_ around. It made it sound childlike, not at all sexy. He had a fleeting mental image of Chace and JC laughing and throwing handfuls of ice-cream at each other – messing around.

"Things were going pretty well. Normal. And then"—Chace's face darkened fractionally—"I guess someone got the wrong idea about me and Jayce."

_The wrong idea? Sounds like they got exactly the right idea_, Ed thought. The idea of a journalist actually getting hold of the truth was, frankly, a little mind-boggling.

"It's been driving me kind of crazy these last few weeks. Nobody can stop talking about it. Like it's this big joke. I guess it's funny if it's not happening to you."

Ed felt guilty for approximately 0.2 seconds. Then he remembered that people were only talking about Chace and JC because it was _true_.

"We kept saying it's not true. And nobody would believe us."

Chace's definition of truth was officially warping Ed's brain.

"I guess JC finally got sick of it. Sick of… sick of…"

_Sick of lying?_ Ed supplied.

Chace exhaled slowly, as if collecting his thoughts. He continued: "JC wanted to come out with it. Not like, _come out_ come out. But admit we've been seeing each other. I guess he thinks he's bi or something. But I'm not gonna do that. I _can't_ do that. It's just… it's making something out of nothing. I'm not gonna stand up and say I'm something that I'm not. You know?"

Ed didn't really know at all, but he said, "Yeah."

"Then there's the Carrie thing…"

Ed watched as Chace blinked rapidly. To his astonishment, he saw tears forming in Chace's eyes.

"She said. Well. I guess. We just. I don't." Chace's voice sank to a mumble. His head drooped and Ed got the feeling he was failing to fight back his tears.

"Gonna need some complete sentences, mate," Ed said, with as much kindliness as he could muster. He again made the effort to pat Chace awkwardly on the shoulder.

"She broke up with me. I don't know if JC told her – I kinda got the feeling he might have hinted pretty hard – or if she found out from someone else. But she found out, anyway. And she said it's over. She said she can't trust me."

Chace was crying openly now.

"I mean, I love her. She means everything to me."

Ed got the niggling feeling he was rehearsing a script – these words were ones he had said before and often. But there was no doubting the emotion was real. Chace was torn up. In all honesty, Ed was more shocked at his crying, his flagrant breakdown, than at the revelation that he'd been having sex with JC.

"This wasn't supposed to happen," Chace continued. "We were supposed to get married. Be together forever."

If it had not been drilled into Ed from a young age that he should never delve too deep into the psyche – never talk about much of anything – he might have questioned Chace further. However, he found he couldn't abide this outpouring of emotion. He didn't want to be Chace's therapist. Ed resented him for spilling his guts all over this sodding couch.

Ed sank back into the couch cushions and closed his eyes. Time had crept insidiously onward – it must be past three by now – and tiredness was beginning to pound inside his head.

Chace had cheated on his girlfriend, but he couldn't understand why she had broken up with him. He had screwed over his buddy, but he couldn't understand where he went wrong there, either. Ed realized that, in Chace's mind, he was the perfect monogamous, heterosexual man. The fact that a murkier, more complicated version of himself was more truthful didn't matter. If he slept with other people, that didn't count, as long he could be _seen_ to be a good boyfriend. The fact that Chace was visibly tangled up in knots wasn't surprising; the whole thing was so confusing that Ed could understand Chace's frustration.

Ed felt the light touch of fingers trailing up his arm. He sighed and opened his eyes, ready to dole out a few meaningless platitudes and tell Chace that everything would be better in the morning. However, with eyes open, he found that Chace had crept along the couch and was sitting much closer to him – too close, in fact. Chace looked at him intently for several seconds. Ed opened his mouth, ready to dispatch one of his prepared platitudes, when Chace lunged towards him.

Actually, it wasn't really a lunge. Chace was far too smooth for that; his movement was fluid and practiced. He leaned into Ed's personal space, placed a hand firmly on his chest and, for just a moment, covered his mouth in a quick kiss. Then Chace pulled away slightly, presumably in order to gauge Ed's reaction. Ed was so surprised that he could only spit out the thing on the surface of his mind:

"You'll find someone else." As far as platitudes went, it was fairly prophetic. Forget about plenty more fish in the sea, Chace had found a fish swimming around in his own bowl.

"Uh huh," Chace murmured.

Evidently satisfied that Ed wasn't running for the door, Chace leaned in again. This time he didn't kiss Ed, but dropped his head into the crook of his neck. He rubbed his cheek against Ed's jawline – almost nuzzling – and allowed his breath to form a patch of slow heat that seemed to spread outward through Ed's body. Chace continued to brush his fingers lightly over the surface of Ed's clothes, occasionally connecting with skin where the clothes fell away.

Ed couldn't deny that it felt good. The last couple of hours receded in his mind. Instead, Ed found himself recalling all the many times over the past nine months when he'd looked at Chace and wondered, _what if?_ They were lazy daydreams, mostly; the kind borne of too much time spent in someone else's company. Now Chace was offering himself to Ed on a plate – and what was Ed going to say? _No_? Ed didn't make a habit of saying no.

Bored of Chace's slow tease, Ed clamped his hands around Chace's face and kissed him hard. It was a kiss of intent more than anything else; sloppy and wanton and full of promise. He thought he caught a hint of smugness in Chace's expression, but he was too horny to care. He yanked at the buttons on his jeans, where his erection was already beginning to bulge. Chace seemed to get the picture pretty quickly, because he slid to the floor, settling obediently between Ed's legs

_Is this what you do?_ Ed wondered for a moment. _Do you give blowjobs when you're upset? Do you make a habit of seducing your friends? Just how many of the criteria for a sex addict do you hit?_ Ed almost laughed. He realized that the real question was: _is there much of a difference between a sex addict and a hot young thing starring in a hit show? Aren't the same things expected of them?_

The thoughts slipped away, as Ed ceased to care about anything except Chace's mouth on his cock.

*

**_Chapter 4_**

 

The next morning (or rather, the same morning), Ed woke up at six. It seemed irreligious to be awake so early on a Sunday, but he stumbled out of bed anyway. He felt woozy from lack of sleep. Even the faint, early-morning sunshine seemed too bright. He realized what he was experiencing was a feeling akin to a hangover.

After the blowjob, Ed and Chace had each gone to their own bedrooms. The brief spike of frantic emotion had been replaced immediately by a return to the ordinary. Mechanically, they had said goodnight to each other – like roommates, definitely not like lovers. Chace's face had been unreadable. He had not asked for any kind of reciprocation. He had no longer seemed upset. Ed couldn't tell if he had reached a state of calm or simply blankness.

To his surprise, Ed found Chace in the kitchen. He was gulping orange juice straight from the container and Ed couldn't help but look at the flex of his neck, remembering the feel of his own mouth against the skin there. Chace swallowed hard and set down the juice container on the counter (worktop). Slowly, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Ed wondered suddenly if Chace had even been to sleep. He had the kind of face that never betrayed fatigue. He never looked truly knackered – pulled apart and squashed back together – the way Ed did. Tiredness translated to a fragility in Chace, a softening of his features that made him seem even more beautiful. Beautiful and fuckable.

"I'm gonna make eggs," Ed announced, a fraction too loudly. "You want some?"

It was an innocent question – Ed made eggs all the time (it was pretty much all he _could_ make) and often shared them with Chace – but now he wondered if it could be misconstrued, conflated with what happened last night. Eating breakfast together the morning after seemed like a dumb, couple-y thing to do.

"No, thanks," Chace said, "I'm gonna go for a run."

Ed nodded and opened the fridge in order to swipe some eggs. However, Chace was apparently in no hurry to make good on his words. He leaned back against the counter and watched as Ed cracked the eggs into a bowl. Ed tried studiously not to acknowledge his gaze. _This is just another morning_, he reminded himself, _this is just breakfast on just another morning_.

It didn't take long for his resolve to break.

"Hey, about last night," Ed said, looking up suddenly. He cringed internally at his phrasing, but forged ahead. "Not a big deal, right? I mean, you had some stuff going on and I was… there. It was just something that happened. And now it's done with."

He was aware that he was echoing Leighton's words, after similarly ill-advised friendship sex. He tried to mould his features into an expression like hers: kind, yet blunt.

Chace, however, smiled back at him with the amused tint of someone humouring a lunatic. "What are you talking about?"

Ed frowned, irritated at Chace's lack of comprehension. He wanted to make it clear that he was cool about last night. If Chace liked to give blowjobs when he was sad, that was absolutely fine. It did not have to mean anything. It was an aberration.

Chace's grin had cooled to a slight smile, a mere quirk at the corner of his mouth. He took a step closer to Ed. He trailed his fingers up Ed's arm. He eased himself into Ed's personal space.

"I'm not really in the mood to go for a run," Chace said in a low voice. "Are you really in the mood for eggs?"

Ed's eyes flickered across his face. That beautiful face; that religiously toned body; those hands that had learned how to seduce so effortlessly. For a moment, Ed felt intensely irritated at Chace's sense of entitlement. He reached out one of his own hands, moulding his palm against Chace's chest. Then he pushed him away. With his other hand, he sent the bowlful of cracked eggs shuddering away, too. He turned and walked out of the kitchen, bare feet slapping hard against the linoleum.

"Fucker, if we're gonna do this," Ed called over his shoulder, "let's do it in a real bed, okay? I'm too dog tired to fuck against the kitchen cupboards."

*

When he was fifteen, he and Katerina Sullivan, who lived three doors from his house in Stevenage, decided to become fuck buddies. Kat was a girl he'd known from childhood without ever really knowing her; their parents were friends and, as a result, the two of them drifted in and out of each other's lives like a lazy tide. One slow summer, she suggested sex-without-strings. She wasn't really his type – a little harsh-looking, with dark hair and pale skin and silver threaded through her lip – but it seemed like a good deal, so he said yes.

There actually wasn't much sex involved – not compared to the ideal amount Ed would imagine from a sex-without-strings relationship. Finding an empty house in which to Do It was near impossible. Instead, they would saunter up to her bedroom ("to listen to music," they told the 'rents) and fuck frantically and silently in the ten minutes that they could guarantee being left alone. Ed still could not think of Katerina without feeling sweats of paranoia and hearing the click of a door opening.

For the length of August, they saw each other every day. Sometimes they fucked, but more often they used each other as scratching posts. They were like kittens rubbing up against each other. It was simple and pleasurable. Ed began to enjoy her company more and more – even the parts where they really did just _listen to music_. Despite his reservations, it really was a good deal. Such a good deal that he figured he might as well up his investment.

One day, as they listened to music in her bedroom, he told her, "I'm kind of in love with you." That was what all girls wanted to hear, wasn't it? And it was the truth: he was in love with her, kind of. He loved the twist of her mouth when she was amused but didn't want anyone to know. He loved the funny shape of her tits, one bigger than the other. He loved the way she saved spiders from the bathtub, taking them to safety at the bottom of the garden. It wasn't grand, heart-stopping love, but it felt good.

"Forfuckssake," she muttered, "I didn't think _you_ would pull this crap on me." She didn't say anything else. She just rolled away from him (removing her hand from his cock) and sat in silence as The Libs strained through the speakers. That was the last thing he could remember Katerina saying to him. Her silence stretched into ignoring him completely, refusing his phonecalls and turning away when she saw him in the street. He still couldn't understand exactly what he'd done wrong, but one thing was clear: introducing the L word into sex-without-strings was a faux pas of epic proportions.

Since then, Ed had had girlfriends, one night stands and friends who he didn't fuck. Anything else seemed fraught with complications. Chace, however… Chace he could never fall in love with. Not even kinda-love. For starters, Chace was a _guy_. Ed might screw around with guys, but he wasn't about to fall in love with one. Chace was a big, dumb, All-American guy who happened to give good blowjobs. Unlike Katerina – who was only okay at giving blowjobs – Chace was a decent option for a fuck buddy. Ed was only amazed it had taken them nine months to reach this conclusion.

It didn't take long for them to fall into a mutually-beneficial pattern. The weekends were, as always, for finding girls. They hit up the bars and clubs on Friday and Saturday and got laid the old fashioned way. During the week, Ed and Chace did their usual thing: they went to work, attended parties and openings of envelopes, came home, ordered food, played video games. The only change was an addition to the list: when they got tired of Xbox and Wii, they had sex. It was as easy and sex-rich as his arrangement with Katerina Sullivan should have been.

One excellent side-product was that it made work a lot more fun. For the two months that the show continued filming, he and Chace experimented with sex everywhere they could. Ed spent more time inside Chace's trailer than his own. More than one runner/wardrobe assistant/make-up artist walked in on the two of them breathing heavily and trying hard to look nonchalant. The runners mostly just thought they were weird – fame had gone to their heads, making them permanently skittish – but the wardrobe assistants probably had a better idea of what was going on. They were, after all, the ones who had to mend the busted seams.

"Aw fuck," Ed said, looking down at his crotch. "The trousers ripped again."

Chace sniggered. "You're like a kid who gets into accidents. And we're in America, doofus. They're pants."

"It's your fucking fault. You're an overzealous prick." Ed let out an irritated growl and pushed Chace back against the wall of 'Constance Billard'. He kissed him hard. The damage was done to his costume, so he might as well get off.

The first few times they had anal sex, they were almost painfully polite. Taking turns, as if it were a fairground ride. Finally, Chace admitted he was a "natural top" (he even used those words, without irony). Ed wasn't about to shout about being a bottom, but he once he got used to it, the sensation of being fucked became addictive. He liked the brief loss of control, the scream of his nerve endings as Chace pushed inside him. He'd engaged in a bit of pegging with an old girlfriend once. It was more of a challenge than an experiment: she wanted to prove to him that, no, it wasn't Just Another Hole. The lime green dildo shoved up his ass (arse) was a way of settling an argument. Maybe he just needed to get used to being fucked – maybe it was a case of the right person at the right time – but Ed got a lot more enjoyment out of Chace than he got from the bright green dildo.

Ed was surprised at Chace's adventurousness. While Ed prized himself on being up for anything, he'd always assumed that Chace was a strictly missionary man, for whom girl-on-top was a Really Wild Time. The reality was not even close. Did all good Christian boys from Texas have such filthy minds? When Chace had been learning to give blowjobs, he'd apparently also learned exactly the right way to tease his tongue inside Ed's asshole. He certainly didn't mind being forced down onto the bed while Ed fucked his mouth, and he barely reacted when Ed came all over his face.

Even Chace had his limits, though – however arbitrary. When Ed suggested picking up a girl so that they could have a threesome, Chace frowned. "I'm not really into threesomes," he said, as if Ed had suggested something unthinkably perverse. Ed looked at him in exasperation. This, coming from Chace, who was one of the dirtiest lays Ed had ever had.

Although Ed enjoyed partying at the weekends – the novelty of picking up different girls – he was frequently relieved to flop down onto Chace's bed on Sunday nights. One such night, he winced slightly as Chace crawled on top of him.

"What's wrong?" Chace asked.

"Nothing," he muttered.

A petite brunette that he'd picked up in a bar the night before had seemed perfectly normal as they'd made out in the taxi. Once back at the apartment, however, she'd innocently asked if he was interested in some light bondage. He'd shrugged and said, "Sure." She had taken that as consent to tie him up and whip him (pretty fucking hard) for two hours. She'd been wet enough for the both of them, but he'd felt like his dick was gonna fall off when she finally took it in the vise-like grip of her hand.

While Chace certainly had his foibles, at least Ed knew what to expect. It wasn't that Ed preferred the placid weekdays, but he did welcome the ease at which he could slip back into sex with Chace.

*

_Gossip Girl_'s first season filming was drawing to a close. It was beginning to feel like summer in Manhattan, sticky as newly-laid tarmac underfoot. On one of their last days on set, the show was filming at the park. While Ed and Leighton were kept waiting as the crew got their shit together, they snuck away. Partially concealed by a screen of trees, the two of them lolled happily, savouring the last few moments of being Ed-and-Leighton, before wardrobe transformed them into Chuck-and-Blair.

Ed watched appreciatively as Leighton rolled a joint. _Gotta love a woman who knows how to smoke_, he thought. She looked pretty today. The thought caught him off-guard. His passion for Leighton was such a flighty creature, easily distracted by other prospects. Today she was dressed down in denim cut-offs and a tank, with her hair a little tangled. She looked nothing like her alter-ego. Her cheeks were flushed and her lips were a pinkish colour, shiny from a lip gloss that he thought would taste of strawberries.

He leaned over and kissed her; a quick, satisfied _mwah_ against her lips. As he pulled away, she glanced up at him, clearly disgruntled. He remembered that she – like Blair – did not take kindly to being kissed without permission.

"Sorry, darling, you just look so delectable today," he said, slipping into Chuck's American accent to take the sting out of the moment.

As an actor, it was not cool to ever betray that you enjoyed the sex scenes or forced intimacy. If anyone asked, he would roll his eyes and handwave it away: "good actors separate themselves from a role"; "not so starved for it that I enjoy getting paid to dry hump someone". But the truth was, sometimes he felt Chuck seep inside of him. Perversely, it was sometimes easier to stare down a situation wearing Chuck's eyes; he was better at New York life than Ed. Sometimes he also missed having the excuse to kiss Leighton; he missed the delicious warmth as her body pressed against his. It was a fleeting thing, of course.

A few seconds rolled by and then, with even less warning, Leighton reached up and kissed him: hard and with tongue, so that when she pulled away, he was gasping. She didn't taste like strawberries, in fact: it was just a synthetic sweetness, the kind manufactured by cosmetics labs to make you crave more.

"Darling, I am _always_ delectable," she said coolly. Her noticeable (and terrible) attempt at an English accent sort of spoiled it, but he grinned sheepishly at her anyway.

She flicked at the joint with her lighter and continued, "You're strange today."

"As opposed to…?"

She took a quick draw of the joint and then said, "Stranger than usual. Like you have a secret."

He shrugged. "I'm crap at keeping secrets."

It was the truth. After his first few interviews, his manager had made him undergo extensive media training, which still hadn't quite knocked the casual (and ill-advised) honesty out of him. He had always considered secrets infuriating unless shared. Yet he also knew that Chace wanted their fuck buddy thing kept secret. It was a drag, but he understood why. Sexually uninhibited he might be, but he didn't like the idea of another JC-and-Chace story in the tabloids, with his own name added to the mix.

Suddenly, Leighton reached over and pinched him.

"Ow! What was that for?" He rubbed his arm where a red mark had appeared. In retaliation, he reached over and stole the joint from her.

"I know what it is," she said triumphantly. "You're fucking someone. You _like_ someone."

Ed, taking a drag and holding in the smoke, raised his eyebrows at her.

"You _do_," she said obstinately.

He exhaled and handed the joint to her. He said lazily, "I'm young, free and single. I'm sowing my wild oats."

"No, you _like_ someone," she repeated. "I can tell."

"Oh, you're Mystic-fucking-Meg now?"

"I don't know who that is," Leighton said dismissively. "Now. Are you going to tell me who you're fucking or do I have to guess?"

Ed couldn't help but smile. "Guess."

A look of intense concentration crossed her face, which clashed with the joint in her hand. Ed's smile blossomed into a grin.

"Albert Hammond Jr," she said at last. "See, I remembered his name. Aren't you impressed? You're fucking that guy from The Strokes and you've been holding out on me."

"No," Ed said, feeling his grin fade. "Haven't seen him in ages."

"Oh." Leighton seemed disappointed. "I did hear he's seeing that British supermodel. What's her name? Agyness Deyn." She gave Ed a sly look. "You've been replaced. She is hotter than you. Better hair."

"Fuck off," Ed said grumpily. Despite his comment, he _had_ seen Albert recently. Across a crowded club, he'd glimpsed him. Him and _her_. Translucent skin and spindly legs. That hair. The two of them, so devastatingly gorgeous together. He brushed the memory aside.

"Taylor!" Leighton said suddenly.

"What?" Ed spluttered. "What kind of perv do you think I am?"

"It was just a guess. Fine. Who else on the cast is available?" she mused.

"You think I can't find anyone to fuck outside this tiny pool of narcissists? I have a fucking ton of prospects."

Leighton arched an eyebrow. She gestured towards herself. "Evidence to the contrary." She paused and then said, "Chace."

"What about him?" Ed asked innocently.

"That's my guess. Chace."

"God, no," Ed said, trying to look appropriately disinterested.

As he watched Leighton narrow her eyes, clearly unconvinced, Ed wondered why he was so bad at lying. He was a good actor – god_damn_, he was a good actor – so he should be able to lie with ease. That was the theory, anyway.

He waited for Leighton to press the matter further. If she asked again, he would just admit it. To hell with Chace. The secret was swelling up in his throat. He wanted to tell her – tell someone, anyone, _everyone_.

Instead, she just nodded. "Yeah, you're not Chace's type."

_What the hell is Chace's type?_ Ed wanted to know. _And why aren't I it?_

Leighton pinched him again. "I got it!" she exclaimed.

"Stop doing that," Ed grumbled. "It makes me like you a lot less."

"Michelle! It's Michelle. It's totally Michelle." Without waiting for a response, she continued, "I mean, she's hot and all. But, y'know. If this were high school – and, let's face it, it's not a million miles away from high school. Anyway, Michelle would totally be voted Most Likely To End Up In Rehab. No offence. She's a sweet girl."

At the point of this Damning By Faint Praise, they were interrupted. A long-suffering runner parted the foliage and informed Leighton she was needed on set. Apparently their hiding place had not been so ingenious. As Leighton separated herself instantly from the role of slacker stoner, becoming instead a True Professional, she began to apologize profusely to the runner. It gave Ed no opportunity to refute the suggestion that he was sleeping with Michelle.

Ed, who cared not about being professional, continued to smoke the joint. He earned a dark look from the runner, but ignored it. Hazily, he waved Leighton away. His eyes wandered across the view in front of him: there were extras milling around, with fraught crew members trying to corral them into place. It didn't take long for him to spy Chace – far away in the distance, but instantly recognizable. Chace was god-like in the sunshine: everyone, from the runners to the actress playing his mother, fancied him. For Ed, the sighting was accompanied by a rush of adrenaline, a chemical burst of remembered-sex. Ed felt the trickle of memories down his spine. The last time had been this morning, in the shower: cold tile against his palms; the scratch of blunt fingernails against his thigh.

Ed's phone beeped. It was a message from Leighton: _tell me who it is!!_

He smiled. His mind was already filling up with thoughts of finding some time alone with Chace on set. There were the delirious how's and why's of sneaking off to screw around; the choreography of not getting caught; the anticipation and release. It was exciting, Ed realized: the endless, exhilarating chase-and-catch that was required to keep their sex a secret.

"_Secrets, secrets, secrets_," Ed sang under his breath, "_are for keeping, keeping, keeping…_"

*

After filming wrapped for the season, Ed and Chace fell back into their cheerfully directionless existences. They both spent less time in the city, pulled in opposite directions by excitement elsewhere. However, Ed did not feel as disconnected from Chace as he'd felt at the beginning of the year. They sent each other frequent emails and text messages – filthy and benign – when they weren't together. The days when they were home – both of them, at the same time – were unexpected and happy: filled with laughter and good sex. Ed felt a twinge each time their lives diverged again, but the _next time_'s rolled out before them; the long promise of happiness to come.

*

_**Chapter 5**_

 

Afterglow faded to mere sleepiness; skin that had hummed before now revealed itself as sticky; muscles reminded his brain that he was no longer as superhuman as he felt in the moment of orgasm. Ed swung his legs out of bed, feeling the satisfied slap of his dick against his thigh. "'Night," he said, rising from the bed and heading for the door.

However, Chace reached out and grabbed him before he could go too far. Chace's hand moulded around Ed's shoulder and pulled him back down onto the bed. He kissed him, long and slow and dirty. Ed made a frustrated, conflicted sound at the back of his throat.

"I gotta sleep, man," Ed said, when Chace released him. Tiredness brought out an unintentional American note in his voice.

Tomorrow they were due back on set; summer was cut short by the artificiality of TV time. It would be a treacherously early morning. Ed liked sex, he liked it a lot, but he also needed some sleep if he had any hope of remembering his lines at six a.m. Not everyone could skate through life on being pretty.

"Sleep here," Chace murmured, reaching up to kiss him again.

"My bed's next door."

"_My_ bed's right here," Chace said, with that maddeningly smug smile he sometimes wore.

"My bed. Is next door," Ed said, pushing Chace away from him and firmly down onto the bed. Once more, he swung his feet onto the hardwood floor.

They always slept apart. That was a fact of their arrangement. Somehow they always wound up having sex in Chace's room. This was possibly because his room was cleaner than Ed's; possibly because Chace was latently a control freak. Either way, if it saved Ed from come stains, he was happy to grubby Chace's sheets and not his own. It was, perhaps, pointless to always crawl back to his own bed afterwards. But sleeping apart set a boundary. They were not, after all, lovers – they were fuck buddies. Sleeping together implied something more.

"You're such a weird kid," Chace said.

Ed bristled. He hated it when Chace used the paltry two-year age difference between them as some kind of indicator of his immaturity. Ed had way more life experience than Chace. He'd been in films – _successful_ films. He'd moved to a completely different country, for fuck's sake.

"You never wanna sleep together," said Chace. "You always race off, like I'm your whore." He punctuated the statement with another smug, teasing smile. "Carry on like this and you'll end up emotionally stunted, completely unable to experience intimacy…"

"You're such a fucking girl," Ed muttered.

"I am truly in touch with my masculinity," Chace said stretching his arms out and puffing up his chest.

There were many Chaces, Ed had discovered over the past year. There was the charmer; the player; the Southern gentleman; the polished professional. He could kiss babies and make grandmothers swoon. Those were the versions of himself that he let other people see. And then there was this Chace: the goofball who fancied himself as funny. Tired and sated and trying to make a joke, Chace became a real person. Not a Ken Doll anymore, but someone capable of making Ed laugh – albeit reluctantly.

Chace seemed to assert victory in Ed's laughter. He tried again to pull him down onto the bed and, this time, he succeeded. They lay together, a not-entirely-comfortable tangle of limbs. _This is intimacy?_ Ed grumbled silently. _I'll pass_. He shoved Chace over to the other side of the bed and arranged himself next to him. Ed was not into spooning, but he was fine with the casual connection maintained between the two of them: arms and legs touching; hands free to wander.

Chace's breathing evened out almost immediately. _Bastard_. Ed hated people who fell asleep easily; he was a twitchy sleeper, just short of insomniac. Ed lay in the dark and listened to Chace inhale and exhale. The rhythm reminded him of being at sea. He stared at the ceiling for a while. Then he rolled over onto his side. He noticed how imperfect Chace looked when he slept: stubbled, slack-jawed, with hair that strove to lose control. Ed wondered what he was dreaming about. Minutes slipped by and Ed finally felt that sleep was close. His final thought before sleep was a dumb one: he wondered if proximity could connect him and Chace in their sleep and allow them to slide in and out of each other's dreams.

*

The next morning, a story ran online proclaiming the fact that Ed and Chace were sleeping together. Obviously, this did not come as a surprise to Ed, who was quite aware of exactly what they did together. However, the rest of the world wasn't supposed to be so clued-in. Ed was, briefly, panicked. Then he realized that everyone thought it was a joke – an extension of the Chace-and-JC story. Ed burst out laughing. It _was_ hilarious. A tabloid story – by definition full of lies and never meant to be taken seriously – was, in fact, completely true. Secrets were best kept in plain sight, after all.

Chace was not nearly as amused. Instead of laughing when Ed told him, his face shut down. "We can't mess around on set anymore," he said blankly. "Have to be more careful."

Ed felt deflated. Careful was not a word he usually associated with passion.

*

Almost a week passed. Ed and Chace – inside the apartment, at least; their last bastion against the tabloids – continued their arrangement as normal. During the week, Ed continued to sleep in Chace's bed. Gradually, he got used to waking up to find Chace beside him. He almost looked forward to the _oof_ of early mornings as Chace flung his arms wide and stretched, followed by the lovely grossness of morning-breath kisses.

Friday, as ever, was a night for going out. Ed felt subdued, a little flu-y. He went out with Chace, but left the bar early, in order to head home home and crawl into bed – his own bed. Chace, predictably, met a girl. Ed heard the two of them come home in the early hours of the morning. He put the pillow over his head and tried to sleep through the noises that filtered through the thin walls.

The next morning, Ed sat on the couch in the living room and ate breakfast – or rather, he slurped coffee and picked the marshmallow bits out of a box of Lucky Charms. The door to Chace's bedroom opened and a leggy blonde stepped out. She wore sheer pink underwear and her tits (very nice, very plastic) were encased in a green shirt. It was one of his shirts, in fact – he recognized the frayed rip at the collar.

When she saw him, she made a show of embarrassment, tugging the shirt down for a moment. It pinged back up as soon as she let go of it and he received an even better look at her taut abdomen and golden outline of pubic hair. Ed could not summon up more than a modicum of attraction for her – although he supposed it was helpful to have a face to put to the moaning sounds he'd heard the night before.

He raised the box of Lucky Charms, offering it to her. "Breakfast?"

"Oh no," she demurred, her voice hazy with a slight accent. "Chace said he would make omlettes."

"Don't hold your breath," Ed muttered.

The girl – Ed had begun to mentally refer to her as Olga, due to her accent and long, blonde hair – looked confused and slightly upset. She hesitated, obviously unsure about whether to stay or go. Ed felt briefly guilty. He tried to make his voice kinder as he said, "You can sit down."

She nodded, relaxing into a smile. With yoga precision, she folded her limbs onto one of the uncomfortable footstools. The two of them sat and stared at each other in silence for a few minutes. Olga's eyes darted compulsively towards Chace's door, clearly hoping to magick him into the room. Ed continued to munch steadily on his marshmallows.

"Nice shirt," Ed said at last.

"Oh… I found it in Chace's room," she said, her widening, catlike smile betraying recent sexual conquest.

"Yeah," Ed said brusquely. He couldn't resist adding: "It's mine."

"Oh." Her face fell, but then she recovered, adding: "It got mixed up in the laundry?"

"Not exactly."

Olga looked confused again. Ed almost stopped there. He could let her have her satisfying one night stand with her sexy guy. She hadn't done anything wrong; he didn't have to ruin it for her. Yet he felt a lash of maliciousness whip at his gut. He leaned forward, meeting her gaze dead-on.

"We fuck," he said simply. "Me and Chace. We fuck a lot. We fucked yesterday morning. The day before. We'll fuck tonight." It wasn't strictly the truth – Saturday was for girls and going out – but he wasn't going to explain their arrangement to Olga of all people. He continued: "Don't think you're something you're not, love. You'll go and I'll still be here."

With perfect timing, Chace arrived at the edge of the scene. Devastating in boxers and nothing else, he arranged himself against his bedroom's doorjamb. "What's going on?" he said with a benign smile.

To Olga's credit, she didn't make a scene. She just unfolded her yoga limbs and disappeared back into Chace's room. She cast a chilly look in his direction as she swept past him. Moments later, she emerged dressed in her own clothes. Without a word to Chace, she strode towards the front door.

Chace, bewildered at her sudden exit, called out, "Baby…"

Ed wondered if he could even remember her name. As the door slammed shut behind Olga, Chace turned on him.

"What the hell did you say to her?"

"Nothing," said Ed. He thought about playing it innocent, but he was too pissed off to do a good job. "I just told her some home truths."

"What the hell is your problem?" Chace said, his voice rising.

"Don't you mean 'heck'?" Ed said snidely.

Chace seemed caught between anger and genuine confusion. "What is _wrong_ with you?"

"I'm sick of you!" Ed exclaimed. He stood up and took a step toward Chace. "I'm sick of your bullshit entitlement. I'm sick of… sneaking around," he finished lamely.

"I thought you were could cool with it," said Chace, still maddeningly uncomprehending. "I thought you got it. Why we have to keep it a secret…"

"I was cool with it. I _am_ cool with it. But. It's _boring_! Never getting to tell anyone anything. My friends think I've turned into a fucking monk, 'cause I never hook up with anyone anymore."

Again, Chace's bewildered expression surfaced. "But you _can_," he said. "You can hook up with whoever you want. You can _do_ whatever you want."

Ed stared at him. "But it's you. It's you all the time. You're here. I come home and you're here. And even when you're not, you're—you're in my head. I don't—" Ed broke off. He couldn't quite bring himself to say that he didn't _want_ to hook up with anyone else. Instead he repeated, "I'm sick of you. I'm _bored_."

Ed let out a defeated sigh. He couldn't form the words properly: he couldn't explain that he was as sick of himself as he was sick of Chace. For all the freedom that Chace espoused – they could both do whatever they wanted! – he had never felt more hemmed in. He wanted a relationship that could see the sunlight, one that didn't have to be locked away. He felt dusty, grimy, lacking air. Sick and tired and bored of it all.

For a moment, Ed couldn't read Chace's expression. Then he realized, from the twist of Chace's mouth, the dull steel of his eyes, that the emotion he was processing was contempt.

"Fine," Chace muttered. "If you're sick of me, I'll go."

Ed sat back down on the couch. In a repetition of the scene with Olga, Chace disappeared into his bedroom and then reappeared, minutes later, fully dressed. He barely cast a glance in Ed's direction as he walked to the door and let himself out. Ed heard keys turn in the door's three locks. He wondered whether it was just force of habit that made Chace lock the door with him inside.

*

_**Chapter six**_

 

In the living room, Ed stacked the uncomfortable-footstool-things into a crazy, unstable tower. He turned the coffee table upside-down, so that the legs stuck up in the air like an abused crab. Next, he turned his attention to the couch. It took a great deal of effort to heave one end of it up into the air, but five minutes later, it was upended vertically. It loomed over him like a particularly crappy sculpture.

Ed stood back and looked at the reconfiguration of the room. He had a lot of mad, restless energy that he couldn't seem to get rid of. He supposed normal people cleaned in these situations, but it would take more than an argument with Chace to break his embargo on dusters and Marigolds.

He thought about going for a run to get rid of his energy, or finding a daytime bar where he could drink himself into feeling better. However, he felt irrational anxiety scratching at his insides. He didn't want to bump into anyone he knew; he didn't want to have to explain what had sent him into this spiral of lunatic-energy. Instead, he stayed home. He drank the three beers that were in the fridge and then rearranged more of the apartment. When he ran out of furniture to rearrange – and his restlessness finally abated – he reluctantly righted the couch again so that he could lie down on it.

By dinnertime, Chace had not come home.

By midnight, Chace had not come home.

By dawn, Chace had not come home.

It was near midday – almost 24 hours since their argument – when Chace finally unlocked the door and walked inside. From his place on the couch, Ed craned his neck to look at Chace. He wondered if he _looked_ like someone who had gone on a crazy interior decoration spree and then stayed up all night waiting for a key to turn in the lock. As he raked a hand through his messy hair, he suspected his poker face was not at its strongest.

Chace looked around the room, looked at Ed, and then smiled.

Ed was stupidly, ridiculously, moronically glad to see that smile. It meant that Chace must not hate him. It meant that the anger between them must have subsided. During the night, Ed had entertained himself with morbid thoughts of _what if?_: what if they stayed in this fight forever? what if they never patched things up? what if it became tabloid fodder? – 'DRAMA: the stars of the hit show who can't stand to be in the same room together!'

"Feng shui?" Chace inquired mildly.

Ed shrugged. "Boredom, mostly." He sat up on the couch and then – limbs cracking painfully – pulled himself into a standing position.

"Looks good," said Chace. "I mean, if crazy crackhead chic was the look you were going for."

"It was," Ed said with a laugh. He tried to make his voice sound nonchalant as he segued clumsily to what was really on his mind. "So what have you been up to?" He knew girl roommates who had policies about calling each other if they were staying out all night. He and Chace – being guys and callous guys at that – had never implemented any such policy. Chace staying out all night was not an anomaly. Ed caring that he stayed out all night was more unusual.

"Oh… you know," Chace said vaguely.

Ed did not know. And that fact was driving him crazy.

Apparently sensing that Ed wanted more information, Chace added: "I've been walking around, trying to clear my head."

Ed had a brief – and embarrassingly paperback-romance-esque – flash of Chace on his nocturnal wanderings. Perhaps he had walked the crowded streets, feeling lonely among thousands of people. When the crowds had finally receded and the clock had ticked two, three, four o' clock, Chace had found an all-night diner staffed by a wise old man. Chowing down on cherry pie, Chace had bared his soul to the old man – revealed his hopes and insecurities. Hours later, unburdened and ready to admit to Ed that _yes_, he _was_ a spineless prick, Chace had headed for home.

"I met someone," Chace continued – and _poof_, Ed's fantasy disappeared.

_Of course you did, mate_, Ed thought. _You could go to the Antarctic and hook up with the only smoking-hot climate change researcher in a thousand-mile radius_.

Chace walked to the kitchen. Ed followed him helplessly, feeling part puppy dog, part horror-movie stalker. He hovered behind Chace, who bent to retrieve the carton of orange juice from the fridge.

"Her name's Alice," Chace said conversationally. "She's great."

_You've known her less than a day, but okay, if you say so._

"She's a painter. She lives in this amazing loft in the Village. She has all her art on the walls. Conceptual stuff."

_Do you think I give a shit? You spent all last night having great sex. Don't pretend like you cared what was on the walls._

Ed noticed suddenly that Chace was pouring the juice into a glass – a glass he'd just finished rinsing clean under the tap. Neither of them had done anything except drink straight from the carton for as long as they'd lived together. Chace took a dainty sip from his glass of juice. He had apparently said all he wanted to about Alice-the-painter-from-the-Village. Ed also found he had nothing to say. (There was plenty he _wanted_ to say, but he knew none of it would make it out of his mouth as anything but a baseless insult.) They stared at each other for several seconds.

Then Ed said, "I'm going to bed."

Instead of pointing out the time – 12:10 p.m. – Chace just nodded and said, "Goodnight."

Once he was inside his bedroom, with the door closed, Ed realized the absurdity of the situation. He felt like a teenager who'd just ended an argument with a parent by screaming, _well, I guess I'll just go to BED then – if you won't let me go out/play Nirvana at top volume/sacrifice goats, I'll just go to SLEEP and DIE_.

On the other hand, Ed hadn't slept in 24 hours, so when he lay down on his bed, sleep came easily. He dreamed of a paint-flecked Medusa who turned him to stone.

*

When he woke up, it was dark in his room. He felt deeply disoriented. His bedside clock informed him that it was just past midnight. His thoughts were still filled with the snakes from his dreams. And there was a hand unbuttoning his jeans.

He'd gone to sleep fully dressed, but the hand obviously wanted to change that situation. Chace – and, though the idea of a disembodied hand appearing in his room was not beyond the realm of possibility, Ed now realized that the hand belonged to Chace – coaxed him out of his jeans. On automatic, Ed pulled his shirt up over his head.

He reached out to touch Chace, who was already naked. His skin was slightly moist, reminiscent of a baby seal. It meant that Chace had just taken a shower. After showering, in a show of (to Ed) staggering metrosexuality, Chace always slathered his whole body with lotion. As Ed breathed in, he could smell it: that generic lotion smell that simultaneously reminded him of beach holidays (sunscreen) and attentive mothers (E45 cream). It was such a strangely evocative scent – and wrong entirely for this situation, as Chace nuzzled closer to him, his erection pushing against Ed's leg.

Ed felt dirty beside shower-fresh Chace. It wasn't hard to read a metaphor into that one. He decided that he should do his best to dirty up Chace. He took charge of the situation, flipping Chace onto his belly and reaching for condoms and lube. They'd had sex in Ed's bed perhaps twice before – but never memorably. It was Chace's room that seemed like the rightful epicentre of their fucking. This fact only added to Ed's enduring sense of disorientation. He fucked Chace hard, but still on automatic – barely enjoying it at all.

Afterward – after he'd finished fucking Chace and hurriedly jerked him off, spilling come all over his sheets – they lay together in the near-darkness, not saying anything. Ed rolled over, so that he could look at Chace. His eyes were closed, but his breathing was too ragged for him to be asleep. Ed stared at him long and hard – almost obstinately. Because, he reminded himself, he was allowed. If someone crawled into your bed at midnight and pushed their cock into your hand, you were allowed to look at them like a lover.

Ed wondered if he might love Chace – just a little bit. The kinda-love he'd felt for Katerina Sullivan. He preferred it when Chace was around and missed him when he went away. But he couldn't tell how deep his affection for Chace went. Were these feelings something that could be dusted off the top of his mind in a few days? Or would this floundering desire last for weeks or months or longer?

Chace opened his eyes suddenly, meeting Ed's gaze. "Hey," he said, his voice soft and low and lovely.

"I need to tell you something…" Chace continued. He reached out a hand to touch Ed, trailing his fingers lightly along Ed's arm.

Ed didn't say anything.

"I need to… " Chace stopped and sighed and then said, "I'm moving out." His soft, soft mouth formed the words as gently as another might say, _I love you_. "I need to find my own place. Alice said I can stay with her while I look. I think it's probably for the best."

Alice the painter with her loft in the Village. _Of course_. Maybe it was worse that Ed wasn't surprised. It was a bigger bombshell than he'd expected, but only marginally so. He wondered what the tabloids would make of it when they found out: _Westwick chases Chace away: roommates and lovers no more_.

The two of them lay together for a while longer, saying nothing. Ed was almost on the brink of falling asleep again, his breath evening out, when he felt Chace ease his body away from him. Ed heard the soft thump of feet hitting the floor and then Chace was gone. He closed the door very gently behind him.

*

The next morning, Ed called Leighton. He gave a halting, fractured version of what had happened. He tried not to sound as wretched as he felt, but he didn't hold much back. There was, after all, no longer any reason not to spill all of his secrets. After ending the call, he walked to the corner store, just for something to do. He bought a pack of cigarettes. As he walked home, he chain-smoked, weaving slowly along the sidewalk in a drunken line.

At their apartment block, he noticed the U-Haul truck parked at the curb (kerb). There were a few boxes stacked on the concrete. Ed looked at them for a long moment. He realized that he didn't want to go back upstairs and watch Chace packing up. It felt like the oxygen had been knocked from his lungs. He sat down heavily on one of the larger boxes. His fingers were shaking as he lit another cigarette. He was so absorbed in the act of smoking that he didn't notice Leighton's approach until she was standing over him.

"I brought you something," she said.

She proffered a brown paper bag. Hoping it contained liquor (booze), Ed reached for it, peering inside. Instead, he found a misshapen cupcake. He looked up at Leighton questioningly.

She shrugged. "I always bring my girlfriends a cupcake when they get dumped."

"Well golly gee, _thanks_," Ed mumbled in an exaggerated American accent.

"Shut up. Cheer up. And eat your cupcake," Leighton said, reaching over to ruffle Ed's hair.

Ed made a face, but he let his cigarette drop to the ground and pulled the cupcake from the bag. He noticed that part of the frosting (icing) was uneven. He glanced at Leighton.

"I got hungry on the way over," she said remorselessly. "What can I say? Your emotional crisis came at a time that was very inconvenient for me. I had to blow off lunch with a very hot guy. Well, maybe he was only medium hot. I was kind of wasted when I met him. No, I'm almost sure he was extremely hot."

"I'm not having an emotional crisis," Ed said resentfully, through a mouthful of cupcake.

"Oh shush, I _know_. Cupcake is, like, a minor romantic blip. If it were a big thing, I would have brought Mississippi mud cake and a pint of Ben &amp; Jerry's."

Leighton took a seat beside Ed, making him scooch over, so that they were both perched uncomfortably on the cardboard box. She put her arm around him, resting her head on his shoulder.

She murmured soothingly, "It's okay. You just gotta get through it. Soon it'll all feel better."

Ed felt her self-help-book platitudes grate on his nerves; they were a dull echo of a thousand other relationships gone bad. He wasn't sure what he had with Chace could even be considered 'romantic'. Could this even be called a break up? Breaking up implied a relationship, which Ed and Chace had definitely never had. Maybe he _was_ having an emotional crisis – but only because he wasn't sure what he was feeling; he didn't know what he was _allowed_ to feel when his roommate-slash-best-friend-slash-fuck-buddy up and left him. Were there self-help books for this kind of thing? _Leighton would probably know_, he thought mockingly. Immediately, he felt guilty. After all, Leighton was here; she had cared enough to come when she knew he was hurting.

Chace appeared at the doorway, holding a television set. In the morning sunshine, dressed in jeans and a 'beater, with hair artfully mussed, he looked part angelic, part pornographic. Ed averted his eyes, concentrating instead on the TV set. That made him remember that the TV they'd been sharing for a year belonged to Chace. _Well, great._ No Euro 2008 on cable for Ed.

"Hey, Leighton," Chace said, sounding faintly surprised.

Leighton smiled at Chace, but she didn't say anything. Ed thought he felt a ripple of tension roll between them. He wondered suddenly if they'd ever slept together. It was not beyond the realm of possibility. Maybe they, like Ed and Leighton, had snuck off during filming, in order to scratch an itch, fill in the blanks of TV-14. Ed found that his head was pounding. Who else had Chace slept with? Michelle? Undoubtedly. Nicole? Yes. He'd seen that one with his own eyes after drunkenly stumbling into a club bathroom. Jessica? Probably. Taylor? No – but it was only a matter of time. Blake? Unlikely, but it couldn't be ruled out. How about her sainted boyfriend, Penn? Ed had never entertained the possibility before, but now he thought about it, it seemed queasily probable. Penn, with his long fingers and softly-spoken musings about Kandinsky, made a pretty good conquest. _Fuck_. Ed could imagine it now: Penn on his knees before Chace; gracefully accepting the thrust of Chace's cock into his mouth.

"I just have to load the last of this stuff into the truck," Chace said, gesturing to the U-Haul. He paused and then said, with a faint smile, "You're sitting on my books."

Books? Since when did Chace read? Now he thought about it, Ed could dimly recall – through the haze of his sex-related memories – that there had been a shelf of books in Chace's bedroom. What the hell did he read? The Bible? The complete works of Charles Dickens? Ed felt the pounding inside his head amplify. He realized how little he knew – really _knew_ – about Chace. He knew how Chace looked when he came, but then, so did half of the free world, apparently. He realized he couldn't remember the name of Chace's sister; he couldn't remember the name of the town where he'd grown up. He knew what kind of beer Chace liked, but not his worst fears or who he voted for or if he believed in heaven.

Numbly, Ed got to his feet. Leighton stayed at his side, clutching his arm protectively. They watched as Chace finished loading his life into the U-Haul truck. Neither offered to help him.

"So, uh, bye," Chace said. It seemed like a general sort of statement, directed equally at Ed and Leighton.

"Bye!" Leighton said in a tone so bright it might have been sarcastic. "I guess I'll see you in the Hamptons next week."

"Yeah… the Hamptons," echoed Chace.

Oh, Jesus. _The Hamptons_. Ed had almost forgotten. They were filming there next week. That was sure to be a special kind of balmy, brightly-lit torture.

For a moment, Chace lingered. The three of them – Chace with his hands in his pockets, Ed and Leighton arm-in-arm – formed a familiar tableau. Ed could almost feel a camera tracking the scene. Then Chace backed away – out of shot – and climbed into the truck's cab. He gave an awkward left-handed wave out of the window as he drove away.

Ed was glad when Leighton reached up and wrapped her arms securely around his neck, suffocating him in a perfumed embrace. He was glad he didn't have to ask for the hug. Leighton pressed a kiss onto his cheek and murmured a final self-help-book platitude into his ear. Ed found this one to be the most helpful of all:

"He's a shit."

*

_**Epilogue**_

 

The next day, a new piece of gossip appeared online. The words, _hot new couple??_ were pasted above a picture of Ed and Leighton hugging. From the angle the picture had been taken (with a long lens, presumably), the chaste kiss on the cheek was transformed into an enthusiastic tonguing session.

Ed mustered a slight smile. He was sitting on his bed, MacBook for company. He pulled up AIM in order to send Leighton the link, but she was Away. The message read: _Lunch date. Italian. (The guy.) Superhot. (I hope!)_ Ed sighed and pushed his laptop aside. He lay back and watched the fan on his ceiling go round and round and round and round. Minutes slipped into hours.

He was roused by the bleep of a new message on his AIM. It was Leighton.

_Hey. Rescheduled lunch date was a bust. Not hot at all. You wanna go out?_

"Yeah," Ed said, answering her question aloud. "It's New York. What is there to do in New York except go out?"

The question seemed to echo around his empty apartment.


End file.
